Flightplan

Saw it on Sky again... a 2005 thriller with Jodie Foster.

Imagine flying from Berlin to New York with your six year old daughter and your husband's coffin. When you wake up 2-3 hours into the flight, you find your daughter missing. An initial search fails. The pilot (Sean Bean) is called in to ask for a thorough search. The little girl cannot be found.
Add to it that you cannot find your daughter's boarding card in your jacket's pocket, you've been on calming-medicines, none of the fellow passengers remember having seen your daughter aboard, the flight attendant says she did not see anyone next to you before the flight took off....and when they call up the security gates back at Berlin, it is confirmed that nobody by your daughter's name ever boarded the flight.

Are you imagining things or has the whole world suddenly turned against you? How can a six year old disappear from the flight?

Excellent plot, brilliantly shot and Jodie Foster. Any more incentives required to watch?

*****
Click here for the teaser

Blood Diamond

A gory tale of how the diamonds from Africa travel to Tiffany's, De Beers and other stores in Europe and US. They change several hands, take a few lives before adorning the fingers in the developed world.

A well told story – built on harsh realities (by no means a real story). Leonardo DiCaprio has acted brilliantly – He was nominated for the Best Actor Academy award for this movie. Worth watching.

****

Click here for teaser

Home Wifi Network

I am quite impressed with myself. Over the weekend I built a wifi network at home. How does it all work? (See attached picture)

– Buy an Apple Airport Express

– Cable it to your BT Broadband Modem

– Connect printer and/or hard drive to the Airport Extreme

– Change your Mac settings to connect (via wifi) to the Airport Extreme for broadband access rather than BT.

Now you can access broadband, the external hard drive and printer wirelessly all over your house.

In my case the 500GB hard drive contains all my music, data and pictures – thereby releasing space on my iBook…and I can access iTunes or iPhoto

The new car...

I remember when my parents bought the first B&W television - it had three control buttons:
Switch on/off/volume, brightness & contrast.

I recently bought a Denon 7.1 channel AV amplifier. It has separate buttons to switch on and off. It has more buttons than I will ever use (or any normal non-geek will). I fully understand that the device is multifunctional but it does not have to compromise simplicity.

iPod wasn't the best portable mp3 player in the world - it was designed with a normal consumer in mind. Nokia is the market leader because it has not changed its user interface since the early nineties - That explains the millions of people who never buy any other phone.

I picked up my new car today. Without getting into the details of the make and model, I must confess that I ordered the highest spec series with the infotainment, SatNav, Adaptive Cruise Control et al. When I couldn't get things to work (they weren't intuitive), I reached for the user manual - it runs into 1200 pages and could be one of the electives in a management programme. I don't know where to begin and how to make everything (or anything) work. I guess that is why God created weekends.

Blow

Though I had seen this movie a while ago, I thought it was good to write about it. As I am planning to read my own blogs when I retire - it would be useful to have a record of what movies I would want to see again...

Blow (starring Johnny Depp, Penelope Cruz) is based on real life story of George Jung who commercialised cocaine in America in the 1970's. His operations were large scale enough to hire planes and professional pilots to bring in "stuff" from across the border. But all the money he made did not change one finality - it was illegal and the law eventually caught up with him. George is still in the prison and will be released in 2014.

*****+ This is probably Johnny Depp's best performance till date. A must-watch movie - a classic of our times.

Click here to see the teaser

All the technology....

Late last Friday night my wife and I decided to stay-in and watch a movie. After scrolling through all the Sky channels, we figured out that there wasn't anything worth seeing that we hadn't already seen. We browsed through our DVD collection – nothing worthwhile there too. The closet Blockbuster would have closed an hour ago. We've all heard about downloading movies so I thought I'd give it a try. The unlicensed P2P (Kazaa, Limeware) are hardly worth because of wrong cataloging, copyright laws, virus etc. and it can take a few hours for a movie to download (if you're lucky) and the iTunes store has limited titles.

So all the technology in the world could not help us get us a movie to watch. Shame.

I have heard of rental movies being delivered by post (www.lovefilm.com) but that needs advance planning too. I am not entirely sure if someone has looked into a way of delivering movies to consumers at the last minute.

How about a "hole in the wall" movie delivery system? There is no reason why movies have to be on DVDs. The movies can be recorded in excellent quality on SD/flash cards, which can be easily dispensed from the local movie points (just as cash points).

Someone from the industry needs to convince all television manufacturers to provide a memory card slot and reader in the televisions and presto – you've got what a consumer wants. Maybe someone is already working on the idea.

Apple, Sony – are you listening?